Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

shuffle-crawled forward with incredible speed, racing toward them, an air hose trailing behind it.
    Victor couldn’t move. His whole body was rigid with fear.
    The thing paused, lifted its head, and regarded them. Victor saw its face then. It wasn’t an insect exactly—there was skin and fur and musculature. But it was antlike. Large black eyes. Small mouth, with pincers and protuberances like teeth. Two superciliary antennae that bent downward across its face.
    “Son hormigas,” said Toron. They’re ants.
    The creature moved its head, eyeing their equipment. Then, seeing that Victor had the largest piece, the heat extractor, and perhaps the most threatening, the hormiga shot forward toward Victor with its first set of arms raised.
    Victor cried out. And just before the arms seized him, the blunt end of a pair of shears struck the hormiga on the side of the head, knocking it away. It was Toron. “Help your father! I’ll hold it back.”
    The creature slid away and then tumbled off the ship, spinning into space. Its air hose snapped taut and held firm, however, and as soon as the hormiga got its bearings, it shimmied up the hose like it was climbing a pole and was back on the surface of the pod. Toron hurried to the hose and severed it with a quick snip of the shears. Air poured from the hose, and the creature lunged at Toron, pinning him to the surface.
    Victor moved to intercede, but Father was quicker, crawling past him and lunging at the creature. “Get the extractor on that grappling arm,” Father yelled. “Now!”
    Victor moved for the arm and snapped the claw around the base of it. He cranked the setting up to maximum and pulled out as much heat as he could. He looked back to Father and Toron and saw that the creature was gone, knocked off the ship by one of them. Toron was on his back, his knee magnets turned around to the back of his legs, holding his lower body against the hull. Father was kneeling over him, clinging to the stomach of Toron’s suit.
    “Victor. Help me,” said Father.
    Victor hurried over and saw at once that Toron was badly wounded. The front of Toron’s suit over his abdomen was ripped and bloody. Father was trying desperately to hold the punctured suit closed. Toron was coughing up blood into his helmet, and his eyes weren’t focused.
    “What do I do?” said Victor.
    “We need to seal the suit,” said Father. “Hurry.”
    Victor tore at his hip pouch for the tape.
    Every suit had a fail-safe system inside it in case of a puncture: Straps would tighten and rings of airtight foam would inflate inside the suit to seal off the punctured area and prevent an oxygen leak. Without these emergency sealants, you’d quickly lose all air pressure and die in fifteen to thirty seconds. The problem was, the seals were never perfect. Air always seeped out, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, but air always found a way. If anything, the sealants were designed to give you a few extra minutes at most to get back inside the ship before you asphyxiated or your body fluids began to boil. Tape could help seal the puncture if the hole was small enough, but it wasn’t the golden solution, especially on a puncture as big as Toron’s.
    Victor found the tape and hit the mechanism on the side to eject a foot-long strip of adhesive.
    “Put it here,” said Father, “where my fingers are. Hurry.”
    The suit was red and wet, and the tape wasn’t sticking because of the fluid.
    “We have to stop the bleeding first,” said Victor. “We have to put pressure on the wound.”
    “He’s losing air,” said Father.
    “He’ll bleed to death if we seal the suit,” said Victor.
    A hand grabbed Victor’s arm. It was Toron, looking up at him. “You find my daughter. You keep looking. You make sure I don’t die in vain.”
    “You’re not going to die. We’re going to get you back,” said Victor, though he knew it wasn’t true.
    Toron tried to smile. “Don’t think so.”
    “Put your hand on the wound and hold it there,” Father said to Victor. “I’ll try to seal your hand inside the suit.”
    Toron turned his head to Father. “Always trying to fix things, eh, cousin? This one’s even beyond you.” He coughed again, and winced, then gasped from the pain of it. Father held his hand. The pain passed, and when Toron spoke again his voice was strained and weak. “Save the ship. Save Lola and Edimar. Promise me that.”
    “I promise,” said Father.
    “I was hard on Edimar. I was a